By Mary Beth Miotto and Robin Cogan, Photo: Unsplash, New England Journal of Medicine, July 6, 2023
“I was working in my preschool health office when the loudspeaker came on, but this time, it was not the voice of the school principal, it was the sound of gunshots. I had no students in my office, so I locked the door, covered the glass, closed the blinds, and hid in the corner. I had no idea if this was an unannounced lockdown drill or an active shooter in our building. In the end, it was a drill, an unannounced one. The person running the drill used an app on her phone that sounded like gunshots, which she played over the loudspeaker.”
Such stories from the field, along with our personal experiences and ongoing conversations between school staff and pediatricians throughout the United States, have led us, a pediatrician and a school nurse, to ask: Have we applied the rigor of evidence-informed decision making to these armed-assailant preparedness drills that have profoundly changed the school experience? The answer appears to be no.
Both the language used to discuss armed assaults in school and the preparedness training programs being implemented to mitigate harm from school shooters are highly inconsistent. Here, we use “armed-assailant preparedness drills” as an umbrella term to include all school programs designed to train the school community in safety responses to suspected armed assailants. These programs were first introduced in schools in the late 1990s and are now prevalent nationwide. According to the Department of Education (DOE), 96.2% of U.S. schools reported having used some sort of written plan to prepare for the possibility of an active shooter in 2019–2020, and 40 states currently mandate active-shooter preparedness in schools.
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